Micro.blog

@amit This is wonderful. For people already on Micro.Blog. But I wonder how people who find your posts from other sources will view asking to have an account (only) on M.B as a prerequisite to comment.

@pratik I ackowledge that concern. However, I am done with providing an annonymous comments form -- that's not something I want to support. Without that, any system I put in place would need an account of some form (disqus, twitter, fb etc).

So my intention is two fold - provide a way for people to comment; at the same time suggest micro.blog as an open alternative to all those siloed platforms.

@amit That I can agree with. With FB, Twitter, etc. sign-ins people are already pushing their visitors to some platform. So why not push for M.B., right? You mention in the post that if someone has an opinion, they should write it on their space(blog) and offer a link - have always believed this.

@pratik@amit Here's the other thing about Micro.blog; people without an account can reply and have those comments appear on Micro.blog, so long as they are using an IndieWeb-friendly custom domain. For people who have neither a Micro.blog account or custom domain, well we are then talking about those who wish to comment without much notion of their identity on the web OR who have yet to discover the idea at all and would in fact be predisposed to discovering Micro.blog, the IndieWeb, and so on.

@amit I really, really like this. It's such a relatively simple add to your post, but it explicitly enables an interaction that readers might not have been aware of. Great! I'm also curious about the question that @vasta asks: How do you grab the m.b link to put in your footer?

@pratik Absolutely, I think that is the best way to publicize the platform and persuade others to join. And for those who can, should write responses on their blogs. Of course, I can't think of any explicit way to push others to that. Only a nudge, to suggest may be they can post and still interact :-)

@vasta@alans I include the url to the post at micro.blog in the metadata of my markdown file - which then gets rendered into template. I haven't yet worked out a way to fetch the post id on micro.blog programmatically as there is typically a lag between post appearing on my blog vs it appearing on the timeline. So for now, I put the url manually in the metadata once available.

@vasta I agree, I keep thinking of ways to make these IndieWeb aspects easier to use, if not implement. For the send webmention part, it is a simple form which sends a simple POST request to the webmention endpoint (one at webmention.io in my case) with a source (taken as input) and target (current url) inputs.

@amit This also refers to something I saw in a conversation that @vasta had with someone else few days ago. Mostly about the nature of importance of giving others a voice on your space. My views have evolved on it since I started blogging 15+ years ago and now align with mostly what you're doing.

@amit This is pretty impressive. Had a poke around with web mentions but honestly it was a bit over my head (for the moment at least.) This is a nice compromise to deal with the unamed/spammer comments as well.

@amit I personally wish that blogs hosted by micro.blog automatically included that link to my posts. My preference would be display it on the post page and not on the home page, in other words here: frankmcpherson.blog/2019/01/0... and not here: frankmcpherson.blog. I can manually provide a link to the discussion thread and you may notice that in the footer I put a link my micro.blog timeline that I labeled Participate in the conversation.

@frankm Absolutely bang on, Frank. Even when I was writing the post, I thought the micro.blog hosted sites would be the easiest and most obvious ones to include such a “discuss” link along with the posts.

I hope @manton agrees with this line of thought. It would really help to promote the platform further.

@crossingthethreshold Not all, some might have been replies on other social networks (mainly twitter) or even individual websites. But I want to highlight micro.blog, so a link only to the conversation thread there.

@amit I agree on not allowing anonymous comments. If people want to comment, they can go through the little hurdle of getting an account. The hurdle w/ m.b. is that it's a paid service, and people are so used to getting everything for free. I recently saw another technique, which you can see at the very bottom of this post. You can see Drew is pointing people at a public-inbox mailing list. I like that idea but, it's a hurdle if you have to attempt to get people to email to the list in plain text.

@rickcogley Such an interesting way to enable comments, I think everyone's finding some mechanism to provide readers with a way to respond.

On micro.blog, I think the barrier is only for account creation - as one can still have a free account just for reply - has to pay only for posting to a hosted blog. So, in a way, inspiring to post a reply is a good to on-board more people.

@amit What worries me is we are looking at this from an insider's point of view. We need to look at it from the outside too, how do we explain this to people who only have Blogger or Wordpress.com as a point of comparison and reference? To me the answer to commenting on hosted MB blogs needs to start out as simple, universal and easy to understand to outsiders and then add in more complex things later.

@amit@vasta@alans@frankm I think there is an issue in GitHub asking for a callback, or maybe a queryable method, to allow programmatic fetching of the Micro.blog post URL for a given blog post. Maybe filed by @EddieHinkle? (I like these ideas, obviously :-) )

@vonhulewicz Yeah, I see what's happened here. The webmention your send is missing the author information, so I ignore them. I think your post is not formatted with all the microformats2 -- especially the u-author. Can you verify if you have handled all from this post from Aaron?

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